They don’t know she is praying. Praying the whole time or reciting poems in her head. Layla is sitting on her knees. They put sharp pebbles on the floor. She pretends to suffer more from them than she actually does. They could be doing far worse to her. The cuts on her knees hurt a bit, but more painful is the strain on her back and hips.
If she goes and lies on her straw mat a guard will come and beat her with an old phone book. It’s the only phone book she has ever seen, because nobody uses those anymore. Sometimes she invites a beating with the phone book. At least she gets to stretch her legs while the guard is beating her.
She is allowed to lie on the straw mat only when the light is switched off. The switch is located outside her cell.
Food comes in via a slit in the door. Pork sausages and the hardest crackers you can imagine. The pork sausages she never touches, for obvious reasons, but the crackers she keeps in her mouth until they soften up a little bit so she can chew them without breaking her teeth. There’s water, but it tastes foul. It smells kinda like moth balls.
From time to time a guard comes in with dogs. The dogs bark and smell her all over. She is always terrified the dogs might bite her. The guard has threatened to rub some tuna spread on her most private area. So the dogs will know where to focus.
So far the worst has been listening to the screams of other teenagers being tortured. She suspects that some of it are recordings. Sometimes the sounds go on for too long to be real. There’s also the wailing of babies. She hopes they don’t have babies here. When it starts she tells herself they are recordings. Maybe even created with AI. She hopes.
Every time a guard sees her the guard, male or female, says: ‘Confess.’
They never specify what she should confess to. Probably something sufficiently terrible to keep her here forever.
She wonders if her parents know what happened to her. They didn’t take her sister that day, she thinks. Unless she was taken later. Maybe she made it home and told their parents how the soldiers took Layla. Maybe they know the soldiers dropped a knife at their feet and claimed Layla had tried to tape it to her leg and it came loose and clang to the cobblestone road.
She knows they are raping the boys. They are even tougher on the boys than on the girls. They use police batons on them. Sometimes broomsticks. Even flashlights.
She’s seen a dead boy dragged through the halls. She saw it when they took her to an interrogation room. It was very clever what they did there. Something like a buffet was put on a table in front of her. She could eat and drink whatever she wanted. She didn’t trust it and didn’t touch a thing. The interrogator, a woman in her twenties, kept telling: ‘You’re such a silly, paranoid girl. You want to suffer. All your sufferings are your own fault. We never mean you any harm.’
Layla couldn’t suppress some laughter. Israeli settlers have burned the sheep shed of her grandparents four times. Until her grandfather gave up and sold all his sheep. Well below the average market price. One night they also came and plowed salt into his fields. So much salt they managed to ruin some of it. Maybe ten percent. Luckily they were too lazy to finish the job. Israeli settlers are not exactly known for their hard-working spirit. It’s usually the Israeli army that does all the hard work in their settlements. And, ironically, Palestinian workers. The same people they hate come and build their kitchen or their terrace.
Today a guard has told her something that is making her feel light with hope. ‘If you get exchanged for our kidnapped people in Gaza we will catch you again soon enough. And maybe you will die before you get exchanged. It would be a mistake to let a little terrorist like you walk free. You will only kill good people.’
All Layla did was throw a rock at an Armoured Personnel Carrier. The only thing she is sorry about is that she missed.
At night Layla is even more hopeful, because her guards step up their torture. That must mean she is close to being released.
Her rough gray colored toilet paper, more like sand paper, is replaced by toilet paper that has verses of the Koran printed on it.
If she wants to receive her daily food allowance she has to spit on a portrait of Arafat. She actually wouldn’t mind spitting on this portrait. First of all, it’s just a portrait, the portrait has no feelings, and second of all, according to Layla Arafat messed up and never decided if he wanted to resist the Israelis full on, milititarily, or resist them full on effectively through peaceful means. If you try to capture two rabbits you catch neither one. Add some tactical mistakes to this like supporting Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait and some spitting doesn’t like like such a sin anymore. She refuses because she wants to comply with as few things as possible. If you comply they raise the bar and come up with worse stuff for you to comply to. You have to be very stingy with your compliances and only comply if it’s really worth it. She won’t touch the pork sausages and she can do without the crackers for one evening.
At night they blast Hebrew heavy metal through the speakers in the whole prison. So unless the guards have ear plus this is torture for everyone, not just the prisoners.
In the middle of the night the guard with the dogs visits her. He has several tins of tuna spread with him and a can opener.
‘Confess’, he says.
Layla remains silent. She prays and prays and prays. Her thoughts go to her parents, to her sister, her grandparents. She convinces herself that resisting now is an act of love towards all her family members. If she can hold on to her dignity in this situation everything that follows in life will be a breeze.
Two female guards pin her on the ground. Layla is not there. Her body, yes, not her spirit. Layla is travelling all over the world. Through time. She visits Palestinians who lived in Palestine before 1948. She visits her great grandparents who she only knows from the stories she was told.
The dogs come and eat. Layla doesn’t feel a thing. This is the only part of her captivity she will never ever share with anyone. She will also never tell anyone the real reason why she instantly vomits whenever she smells tuna.
The next day Layla is released. There was a deal about captives between Israel and the Palestinian resistance.
Layla has defeated her captors.
One of them spit in her face as she walked through the gate, but she feels victorious.
The first thing she does at home is pray with her sister. Then she helps her mum weave baskets from palm leaves. She and her mum supply the whole village with baskets for free. Don’t worry, they get a lot of free items in return. Herbal remedies for Layla’s scarred knees, for example, and jars with pickled vegetables.
Layla threw a rock, but her heart never turned to stone.
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The Confessor 